


Glimpse the Unthinkable

by Mertiya



Series: Odds//Ends [16]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Altered Mental States, Jace erases his own memories again, LITERALLY, M/M, Mind Rape, No one is surprised, Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, mental gymnastics, mind magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-04-02 17:29:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4068484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a run-in with the Boros, Ral is badly injured.  Jace attempts to heal him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glimpse the Unthinkable

            The sky above was a clear, flawless blue.  Ral Zarek glanced upward briefly and scowled, sparing a moment to be irritated at the sunny weather before turning his attention back to his pursuers.  It was the Boros again.  Two wojeks were shouting incomprehensible insults at him and waving large swords in his general direction.  _Honestly_.  Ral didn’t even know what they were upset about.  He had been lying low, and he had a definite distaste for the entire procedure.  In any case, he might as well stop now.  He might as well do something big enough that he would _know_ why people were trying to kill him.

            Turning a corner a block ahead of the wojek menace, Ral skidded to a smirking stop in front of the Guildpact’s office, flashing a grin at his two pursuers as he backed up toward the doorway.  “Too slow,” he said with a nonchalant wave and turned to give a nod to the Azorius arrester who guarded the door.

            She wasn’t there.  Standing in the doorway instead was another wojek, who gave a dark smile, then put out a hand and shoved Ral roughly backward.  He tripped on the cobblestones, flinging out his arms in a failed attempt to regain his balance, and then landed hard on his back. Stunned for only a second or two, he yanked on his manabonds, raised his arms—

            --and the lightning fizzled and dissipated as the wojek from the doorway raised a hand herself.  Ral gasped in breath for an obscenity as she skipped down the steps, at the careless touch of blue mana that had stifled the spell before it had the chance to form. He started to roll to the side, but the other wojeks had caught up, and one of them slammed him backwards into the dirt. 

            “Hold him still,” ordered the woman who could not be a wojek, and she bent over him, her hand crackling with energy.  Ral struggled, but could not escape, as her fingers brushed against his forehead.  There was a moment of blinding pain, and then darkness.

~

            Jace’s first thought, on hearing the commotion outside, was that they were in the middle of a riot again.  He was getting a little tired of riots, but he sighed, got to his feet, and locked his door, as Lavinia had instructed.  Then he settled back into his chair to continue with the day’s paperwork.  It was beginning to be oddly relaxing, really.

            After a few minutes more of shouting, he found the experimental earplugs Ral had given him the day before and spent a few minutes rolling them around in his hands to make sure they wouldn’t explode.  Reassured by the lack of pyrotechnics, he inserted them and was greeted with pleasant silence.

            Elbow-deep in paperwork, he didn’t look up until a blue-gloved hand was shoved directly under his nose.  Oops, Jace thought guiltily, apparently the ear-plugs had worked a little _too_ well.  He reached up to take them out, “Yes, Lavinia what is—”  The sentence stopped abruptly as he saw who she had with her.  The arrester behind Lavinia held the limp form of Ral Zarek, whose eyes were shut, face slack and blank.  Jace got to his feet so quickly he knocked over the chair behind the desk.  “What happened?” he snapped.

            “He was attacked by wojeks,” Lavinia said grimly, gesturing to her companion to get Ral onto the pallet at the side of Jace’s office.

            Jace groaned, torn between concern and exasperation.  “What did he _do_?” he demanded.

            There was a pause.  “Nothing,” Lavinia said quietly, after a moment.

            “What?” asked Jace, reaching up to twiddle a finger around his ear, in case Ral’s magic earplugs had somehow given him hearing loss.

            “I have looked through all complaints, records, and arrest warrants issued since the incident during the Festival,” said Lavinia.  “Guildmage Zarek has not been mentioned once. He has not even attempted to gain the authority to redecorate New Prahv, which I consider almost miraculous, as we have had an influx of new recruits over the past few days.”

            “Then—why—” Jace said.  “He’s paid reparations for the Festival!”

            “That’s what I am going to find out from Aurelia,” Lavinia said grimly. “I will summon the Selesnyan elf, if you believe she will be able to help heal him.”

            Jace nodded tentatively.  “I—yes—get Emmara,” he said.  “I’ll stay with him.”

            As the door shut behind Lavinia, he knelt beside Ral and took his hand. The Izzet guildmage did not move, lying utterly limp and still on the pallet.  Jace’s breathing was oddly loud in his ears as he put a hand in front of Ral’s mouth to check his breathing, reminded suddenly and poignantly of the first time that they had—

            Ral was breathing shallowly and unevenly, as Jace wrenched his mind back to the present. There were bruises forming on the lightning mage’s wrists, and one on his cheek, as well as two round, red marks on his forehead like burns.  Jace stooped over him, and, suddenly unwilling to wait for Emmara, reached out a careful mental tendril toward his lover’s mind.

            A flash of hot pain stabbed through Jace’s skull, and he drew back hurriedly with a gasp.  It took a moment for his dizzied brain to straighten, and then he recognized the ugly, corrosive touch of black mana, and he clapped his hand to his mouth to suppress the automatic gag reflex.

            Jace swore.  He wasn’t going to wait for Emmara.  There was black mana in Ral’s mind, and who knew what kind of damage it was doing right now. The longer they waited, the more danger his lover was in.  He shook his head.  Besides, it was inside Ral’s mind.  This wasn’t a physical ailment, and Emmara might not even know what to do.

            “Please hang on,” he whispered, and then he began to draw mana. First, he felt for the cool, blue water of the fountains and rivers that traced their way throughout the plane, for the almost bottomless depths of the oceans, the taste of salt, and the free-flowing currents.  They swirled around him; Jace felt heat building at the inside of his palms and eyelids as he drew more and more mana, reaching out to the tall, shining pillars of the Azorius and drawing the whiteness of the waving grain on Zendikar and other planes. Almost vibrating with the amount of mana he had pulled to him in such a short time, he moved his hands, focusing on the white, thinking of Lavinia, and drew around himself a ghostly, shining shield.

            Then he focused on Ral and, instead of extending a mental tendril as he normally would, projected himself directly into the Izzet mage’s mind. It was a more forceful, all-encompassing version of the spell he had used several times to play with Ral’s responses during sex.

            Jace had a sudden sense of dizzy vertigo, as if he were falling from a great height, and then the world broke apart.  For a terrifyingly long moment, Jace’s mind tried to impose order onto a reality that contained more things simultaneously than he could process. He seemed to be standing inside a square room of mirrors, each one reflecting Ral Zarek’s smug face off to infinity, but at the same time, he was wading through a stormy sky of lightning bolts, the clouds rolling so hard beneath his feet that he couldn’t keep his balance.  Or perhaps he was standing in front of a vast stone statue of Jace himself, completely naked—of course, he wouldn’t have expected anything less, Jace thought irritably—that was male.  Or female. Or both.  Or neither.  There were other versions of Ral’s mind, too, trying to force their reality onto Jace’s beleaguered senses, and he knew there was no way he could impose any kind of strict, single viewpoint onto this glorious, roiling mess.

            Sighing, squinting, and with the beginning of a headache gnawing at his temples, he started trying to move through here, to feel the shape and curve of Ral’s mind holding his awareness.  Something skittered in the side of his vision, and Jace turned to see an ugly, black thing—something like a hole in reality that moved like a spider with one too many legs.  It was growing as Jace watched, slowly but perceptibly, and as it grew, cracks began to spread through Ral’s mind, equally slow, but still terrifying.

            Gritting his teeth, Jace moved his mind dizzyingly through yet another dimension to call on his manabonds and produce a large, glowing phantasm, trailing sparks of blue and white light that dove toward the black construct in eerie silence. Illusion and darkness collided with one another in an explosion of colors, still silent.  Jace felt the corrosive shock of the thing like acid in his mind, and he drew harder at the white spires of New Prahv, forcing his will and his magic against it until it was gone, steaming up in a pathetic little wisp of smoke.  He let out a soft gasp as he felt the darkness evaporate, but it had left behind a ragged tear in the fabric of Ral’s mind.  And there were others.  Jace could feel them like little burning knots of unreality, trying to hide behind the chaos of Ral’s mind even as they ate away at it.  This was not going to be simple.

            Grimly and painstakingly, Jace, accompanied by his silent companion, began to make his way through a place that had no up or down, no landmark other than the actual thoughts and memories he brushed past.  He started sorting his way through everything, mentally apologizing for the flagrant disregard of privacy, but he had to check each thing carefully to make sure that nothing was hiding in it and that it was undamaged.

            The holes were reparable, but it wasn’t easy, and it was only thanks to the seething chaos of Ral’s mind he could do it at all.  The lightning intertwined with itself in such a way as to leave a resonating pattern that he could follow, could use to fix the holes, if they weren’t too big, if he concentrated hard enough and worked fast enough. Pain blossomed in Jace’s skull, and he pushed it back with the beginnings of panic.  He was suddenly and forcibly reminded of standing in front of Tezzeret, desperately calling creature after creature from the aether, only to watch each dismembered corpse fall before him and dissipate, knowing that it was because of his own failed strength.  He had the same feeling now, the awful pain in his head, trying to do something that took more effort than he could give—only there was something more at stake than a few summoned creatures.

            “Damn it, Ral,” he muttered as he worked his way through the Izzet mage’s mind. “How did you get yourself into this, anyway?” He would probably find out somewhere in the middle of all this, if his brain wasn’t too addled by that time to process the information.

            Red and blue fire flared around him as he took another step forward, and large warning lights started blinking as he continued, but there ahead of him was the biggest blot of darkness yet, scrabbling at something that might be a locked chest, or a beating heart, or another shifting stone statue.  Jace gritted his teeth, and strained his mind so hard that heat began to build behind his eyes.  This might very well be the last enemy.

            Blue and white sparks played across Jace’s hands and across his vision as he sent his phantasm crashing against the remaining creature.  Darkness threatened to surge up and overwhelm him—this thing was big.  Bigger than the others had been.  It reared up as Jace watched, twisting halfway around, and began to advance on the mind mage. Jace could hear his own breathing ringing in his ears, but he shook it off.

            His phantasm began flickering in the air as exhaustion caught up with him, and little tendrils of blackness started to worm their way through his shields toward him.  Dammit. Jace’s connection to his mana sources was starting to waver in the face of the assault.  He needed something else.  He needed more.  The black mana touched his skin, pricking painfully across it.

            He could not die here.  Ral needed him.  Looking up into what was suddenly a stormy sky above him, Jace smiled grimly.  He knew where to find another mana source. He knew the taste of more than just blue and white mana, after all, didn’t he?  Dropping his shields, Jace raised his arms to the sky. As the insectile creature lunged, he felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.  He had no idea what he was doing, but he desperately hoped it worked.

            There was an explosion of light that seared through the back of Jace’s eyelids. The flow of mana was everywhere, thrumming through his blood and snapping his body in to an arc. This was much, much more than any of the shocks Ral had given him.  Jace tried to cry out and found that he was no longer in control of his own body. Searing fire surged through every limb, every appendage, until there was nothing left but heat and pain.

            When it was over, Jace blinked his eyes slowly and opened them. He was slumped on his back, and there was no sign of the thing he had been fighting.  He hoped that meant it was gone, because the fog of pain in his head was too great for him to be able to search for it anymore. Groaning, he started to pull himself upright.  It took longer than he would have liked, but eventually he was standing once again.

            The thing in the center was still there, wound round with chains and flickering lightning.  Guiltily, Jace reached out for it, murmuring, “I’m sorry, Ral.”  His fingers slid easily past the defenses, and it suddenly occurred to him how utterly easy it would have been at any time for him to invade Ral’s head.  Not that he ever would, but for Ral to _trust_ him this much—

            Trust. That was the first thing he found inside the box.  Trust and love and—Jace swallowed, feeling a little light-headed as Ral’s feelings crashed across him.  Ral’s feelings for Jace.  Of course, he had known the lightning mage cared about him—it was fun to tease Ral for denying it—but Jace was staggered at the magnitude of the feelings he had stirred. Images and memories flashed past, swirling through his head, just brief fragments, one after the other. Ral teasing him, needling him until Jace, who remembered these perfectly from the other side, vaguely would have wanted to throttle him.  Except that, along with the events came Ral’s perspective on them. Jace found it suddenly oddly difficult to swallow.  He supposed that he often _did_ feel better after Ral’s needling—he just would never have suspected the Izzet mage was doing it on purpose.  He never would have guessed that most of the reason behind Ral’s teasing was to help him cope with his stress.

            This was an even worse invasion of privacy than Jace had suspected, and the lightning flashes around him were growing stronger and brighter. Ral was waking up. Besides, Jace himself had very little strength left.  With a sigh, he let go.

~

            He was slumped over on his elbows above Ral, who was groaning and blinking his eyes.  “What just happened, Jace?” the lightning mage managed.

            “Why don’t you tell me?” snapped Jace.  “You were attacked by wojeks.  And probably someone else, too.  There was a nasty piece of black mana in your head trying to eat your brain.”

            “Well, isn’t it a good thing I have you to clean up after me?” Ral responded, tired but still smug.

            Jace groaned and sat back.  His head was pounding ferociously now, and he still wasn’t finished exerting it. “Ral, I, um,” he said.

            “Yes, Guildpact?”

            Jace flushed.  “I had to go through your mind rather thoroughly, just now,” he said.  “And I may have, ah, seen some things you didn’t want me to.”

            Ral’s grin slipped very slightly.  “What kinds of things?” he asked carefully.

            “The kinds of things that mean I am going to do two things right now.” Jace took Ral’s hand and squeezed it.  “First of all, thank you. Honestly.  I’ve never—”  He couldn’t find any useful words.  “Well, anyway.  Thanks.”

            “Been looking through my mind for sex tips, Guildpact?  You’re welcome.”

            “Secondly—I will murder you if this goes wrong.”  So tired that his eyes were crossing, Jace peered back into his own head.  At least he was no stranger to his own memories. 

            “What do you mean—Jace, what are you doing?  Jace?”  Ral’s voice grew faint as the spell began to take effect.

~

            Jace woke up with the mother of all headaches.  He was flat on his back and almost everything hurt. He could hear voices, but it took him a moment to process them through the pain.  What he picked out first were not the words, but the identities of the speakers.  Ral and Lavinia, both concerned, both angry.  He tried to say something, but all that came out of his mouth was an incoherent groan.

            The voices paused for a moment and then grew louder.  Hands on Jace’s shoulders, breath near his face. His own name being repeated in his ear, in between words that were getting slowly clearer.  “…remember me?”  Ral’s voice sounded frankly panicked.

            “What?” Jace managed this time.  He tried to open his eyes, but shut them again hastily as light and pain speared through the cracks in his lids.

            “Jace? Do you know who I am?”

            “Of course I know who you are, you imbecile,” Jace mumbled through dry lips. “You’re the Izzet lightning mage.” There was a strong silence, and then Jace cracked a feeble grin.  “Yes, Ral, I know who you are.  I’m very glad you’re all right, since I have no idea what happened after I went into your head to fix whatever the Boros did to you.”

            “I have lodged a formal complaint with Aurelia,” Lavinia’s voice said. “I am glad to see that neither of you appear to have suffered permanent injury.  Emmara is waiting to look you over, Jace.”

            “You bastard,” Ral said, his voice momentarily heavy with an emotion Jace could not identify.  “You erased your own memories, Guildpact.  Again.”

            Jace attempted to open his eyes again, succeeding this time. “Must have found something in your head I didn’t need to remember,” he said.  “Honestly, Ral, clean the place up sometimes, will you?”

            There was half a heartbeat of pause, which was significantly longer than Jace had expected, before Ral said, “If I’d known I was going to have company, I would have,” with a leer. 

            Jace gave him a sideways look.  He seemed uncharacteristically serious for Ral.  “I really am fine,” he pointed out. “Please don’t set the district on fire again.”

            “You simply have no faith in me,” sniffed Ral, again after that slight heartbeat of pause.  Then he ducked his head and kissed Jace on the mouth, long and lingering.  Jace sighed into the kiss, his hand reaching up to catch firmly at the back of Ral’s neck.

            “I love you,” he murmured into Ral’s mouth, and he felt his lover’s lips curl against his in a smile.


End file.
